Student debt rises 5 percent to $26,600 for class of 2011

Almost two-thirds of students who graduated from college with a bachelor’s degree in 2011 had students loans and their average debt was $26,600, up from $25,250 in 2010, the Project on Student Debt said in a report issued Thursday.

The 5 percent increase is similar to increases in recent years, the group says. The project is part of The Institute for College Access & Success, a nonprofit based in Oakland.

The institute does not give average debt levels for all students, including those with no debt, but it works out to roughly $17,550 nationally.

The report lists California as a “low-debt” state. Only 51 percent of students graduating last year from California schools in the report had loans. Of those who did, their average debt was $18,879 — about 71 percent of the national average.

The report is based on survey data reported voluntarily by schools to Peterson’s, a publisher of college guides. It includes data from about 55 percent of all public and private nonprofit schools, which together enroll about 80 percent of graduates from those types of schools. For-profit schools are excluded from the report because so few of them contributed data.

Some colleges flagged as high-debt schools in previous reports have stopped reporting data. “We found that about 12 percent of all colleges that reported debt data in 2010 didn’t report in 2011,” says Lauren Asher, the institute’s president.

Unlike college-loan data put out by the U.S. Department of Education, which includes only federally backed loans, the institute’s report also includes private student loans. The institute’s debt levels do not include federal PLUS loans taken out by parents.

Debt levels varied widely and depend on the school’s tuition, living expenses in the area, demographic makeup and financial aid access and policies.

Because so many schools are missing from the report, the institute is reluctant to publish a list of schools with the highest and lowest debt loads.

However, of schools with more than 100 graduates in 2011 listed in the report, the one with the highest debt level was Lawrence Technological University, a private non-profit school in Detroit. The report says 74 percent of its graduates borrowed and had an average debt load of $46,677.

The lowest reported debt level was at York College, part of the City University of New York. Only 24 percent of its graduates borrowed and had a total debt of $2,996.

In California, the highest-debt school was La Sierra University in Riverside, which is affiliated with the Seventh-day Adventist Church. The average debt among the 68 percent of students who borrowed was $42,934.

“We are deeply committed to helping every student who is admitted to La Sierra University find the resources to reach their educational dreams,” the university’s president, Randal Wisbey, said in a statement. He added that La Sierra serves students from economically stressed areas such as the Inland Empire.

Second highest was Dominican University in San Rafael, where 83 percent of students borrowed and graduated with $41,189 in average debt.

The schools with the lowest debt were California State University Sacramento (69 percent had debt averaging $3,541) and Pomona College (a private school where 41 percent graduated with average debt of $7,540).